Program Notes

A Walk in the Park is a version
of a text written for the InvisibleIdeas project, presented by Nature and Inquiry
artists group as part ofthe 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival. The artwork
linked landscape andideas to locations on Commonwealth Avenue Mall, the
Boston PublicGarden, and the Boston Common via a GPS-enabled handheld
computer.Participants experienced the spoken text through headphones as
theywalked through the parks. In the walk, individuals were invited
toexplore the interplay between natural phenomena and human
consciousness.

A Walk in the
Park was written as a performance text to be spoken aloudbetween the
presentation of five recorded and/or 'live' musical pieces.There
are four sections of the text. In this performance, electronicmusic from A
Common Ancestor is presented between each of the sections.Two
‘live’ pieces are presented at the beginning and end of
theprogram, respectively.

The content of the text reflects
aspects of culture, science, and the environment.

Two Interludes for Speaking Voice, Violin, Piano

Two Interludes are based on 14
short quotations praising the virtues of nature by luminaries ranging from
Zeno, Leonardo, and Galileo to Rachel Carson and Lynn Margulis.

A Common Ancestor

Electroacoustic Music

The music for A Common Ancestor contains an assembly of sampled sounds,
including insects, birds, animals, as well as environmental sounds from
forest, wetland, desert, ocean. The music is divided into ten contiguous
sections. The sampled sounds within each section have been modified using
signal processing or have been used to trigger various sound generators via
MIDI control. The structure of the music is generated from integers derived
from the letters of the names of each creature, or environmental sound. The
integers determine the duration of sound or silence for each voice. In
addition to the processed sound, sampled sounds occur throughout the music
in their purely acoustic form, providing secondary voices that form a quiet
textural background.

12 Haiku for Speaking Voice and Violin

Following the traditional
form, each Haiku contains 3 lines with a 5-7-5 syllable scheme. The
‘musical’ Haiku for the violin follow the same pattern. Each
Haiku is composed of three measures. The first measure has 5 tones, the
second measure, 7 tones, and the last measure, 5 tones.

The
violin Haiku employ the fundamental intervals that appear in the natural
overtone series. Most of the Haiku feature a single pitch interval.
Overall, intervals range from octaves, fourths and fifths, to thirds,
seconds, and tritone. Three Haiku are based on two related intervals: major
and minor 3rds, major and minor 2nds, and fifths and fourths. There is a
Haiku based on the ‘pentatonic’ scale, an ‘open
strings’ Haiku, and one that incorporates a’12-tone’
scale.

Typically, Haiku employ themes associated with the
natural environment. In these Haiku, I have taken the liberty of
interpreting nature within a
slightly broader context.